Archives

March 2011

It's time for our annual Songwriters' Special! While recording songwriters will find useful reviews and advice in every issue of RECORDING, our March 2011 issue is really something special. It's packed full of hands-on practical advice for songwriters, straight from hard-hitting industry success stories.

Tom Silverman burst into the music scene with the phenomenally successful Tommy Boy Records label, and now travels the country with the New Music Seminar, a multi-day event with industry panels that provide fantastic advice for up-and-coming music professionals. In our March issue, he opens up on the practicalities of making as a songwriter in the modern music industry, with sound advice on using the newest media tools to get yourself heard and known.

It's hard to argue with success: producer Sebastian Arocha Morton guided dance diva Samantha James to the top of the Billboard Dance chart. Read about how they got there, turning ideas into a phenomenally successful reality with methods you can use!

Frequent contributor Bruce Kaphan knows what songwriting success is all about, too... he's had great good fortune with American Music Club and as a solo artist. His article covers the three Ps of a successful songwriting career: how to Present your material, Promote your image, and Protect your music while doing it. Not to be missed!

We know it's not all about the gear, but a songwriter always benefits from having the best available tools. This month we bring you reviews of new and improved KSM mics from Shure, the Roland JUNO-Gi (a keyboard workstation with multitrack audio recording built in!), iZotope's powerful Nectar plug-in for vocal treatment, and more.

If you're a songwriter just getting started doing your own recordings, or if you're a practiced artist looking to get to the next level, you can't afford to miss the great advice and timely reviews in the March RECORDING!

Pick it up now on the newsstand... and so you get your next issue early (and save on cost), why not hit the big red Subscribe Now button on this page and have RECORDING delivered to your door each month?

Features

Anaheim was buzzing with new energy, new enthusiasm, new ideas... and tons of new recording gear! Come with us and check out the highlights.

Anaheim was once again home to the NAMM Show, with over 1600 manufacturers showing ......Expand

Anaheim was buzzing with new energy, new enthusiasm, new ideas... and tons of new recording gear! Come with us and check out the highlights.

Anaheim was once again home to the NAMM Show, with over 1600 manufacturers showing everything from guitars and drums and pianos to the latest in modern music technology. The economy's slow climb out of the darkness continues, with new product releases and increased confidence evident throughout the show. We can’t possibly fit everything we saw into this report -- it would fill the entire magazine and then some! -- but here are quick mentions of as many products as we can cram into our pages....

You don't get what you deserve in the world of songwriting, you get what you work for. Here are three prizes you need to keep your eye on as you storm the charts.

You write songs, but are you doing everything you should to take care of the business end of songwriting?

As a reader of Recording you are, by definition, a recording musician who knows how to make a song sound good. Today we'll help you focus on how to present the song so as to maximize the business potential of your production.

Protection of your work is important. You may have seen the monthly columns that entertainment lawyer Todd Gascon and I have been co-authoring, called It's Your Music -- Know Your Rights. From those texts I'm summarizing points to keep in mind for the protection of your work.

Lastly we'll suggest ways to promote your songs-some time-tested ideas for how to turn your songs into income generating entities....

A magical violin/piano session comes together in a good room with good mics, and you are there.

"Not Forgotten: Three Scenes For Violin and Piano" is an important piece for me, and after rehearsing the work thoroughly with Q......Expand

A magical violin/piano session comes together in a good room with good mics, and you are there.

"Not Forgotten: Three Scenes For Violin and Piano" is an important piece for me, and after rehearsing the work thoroughly with Quan Gi and Ben Laude I decided to find the very best studio I could afford to track and mix in. I had been hearing a lot of good things about BiCoastal Music, Hal Winer's facility located just north of Manhattan, so I booked a 4-hour session there....

A major upgrade of your DAW PC is almost always some kind of "adventure." For nearly five years I didn't upgrade -- what stopped me were OS platform upgrade issues/fluctuations, PC interconnect standards changes, and nominal CPU power upgrades that were neither meaningful nor "affordable". (See my Fade Out in the August 2010 issue of Recording).

I finally pulled the trigger to build a new machine in September of 2010. Sticking to my usual upgrade "budget" of $700, I actually came in a few dollars under with an Intel i7 950 3.06 GHz quad-core processor, 6 Gigabytes of RAM, motherboard, and fanless video card. This upgrade was a big change in many ways, superseding an AMD 3800+ X2 dual core with 4 GB of RAM running Windows XP 32-bit that I had built in December of 2005.

As of the end of November 2010 I can report the following: As someone who's worked with practically every OS Microsoft has ever released, my approach to migrating to Windows 7 was slow because of prior experience. So in the months of July, August and September, I upgraded my wife's laptop, my main gaming/Internet machine, and my DAW to Windows 7 respectively....

A friend of mine called to tell me how excited she was. She had put a set of photos up on one of the photo-sharing websites, and she'd got an email from a publisher who wanted to use her photograp......Expand

About Getting Paid.

A friend of mine called to tell me how excited she was. She had put a set of photos up on one of the photo-sharing websites, and she'd got an email from a publisher who wanted to use her photograph in a book they were publishing. She was overjoyed at her work being recognized and about getting published, and she'd signed the release form they'd sent her to allow them to use the photo.

So I asked her how much money they were paying her for it, and she got very quiet all of a sudden...

What do agents do, why do you need one, and why won't people talk to you directly if you don't have one? Read and be enlightened.

Just as dealing directly with artists and their foibles is not what record companies prefer, m......Expand

What do agents do, why do you need one, and why won't people talk to you directly if you don't have one? Read and be enlightened.

Just as dealing directly with artists and their foibles is not what record companies prefer, music promoters and venue owners also often prefer to deal with agents who represent "acts", rather than dealing with the acts themselves. It's a similar set of issues -- one business person (the promoter or venue manager) knowing and trusting that another business person (the agent) will understand and not be overly emotional about the day-to-day details of booking acts...

A respected desert-island mic gets a sonic makeover, and a promising new design shines on vocals.

Today we look at two recent releases from Shure. One is brand new, and the other is an improved reissue. Let's begin with the ......Expand

A respected desert-island mic gets a sonic makeover, and a promising new design shines on vocals.

Today we look at two recent releases from Shure. One is brand new, and the other is an improved reissue. Let's begin with the latter -- I have owned and used the KSM44 (first reviewed March 2001) and was keen to see what improvements come with the KSM44A...

Billed as a "complete vocal suite", iZotope's Nectar contains 11 full-fledged vocal effects, and yet it is not a plug-in bundle, it is one plug-in that has all of the following ......Expand

iZotope Nectar vocal processing plug-in suite.

Billed as a "complete vocal suite", iZotope's Nectar contains 11 full-fledged vocal effects, and yet it is not a plug-in bundle, it is one plug-in that has all of the following under its hood: compression, eq, gate, de-esser, limiter, saturation, doubling, delay and reverb. If that wasn't enough there is also full-on pitch correction, and last but not least, a breath control module...

Whether over FireWire or USB 2.0, this interface combines great routing flexibility, powerful internal DSP effects processing, and standalone cue mixing for use without a laptop. Also in this review: MOTU's Volta voltage-control interface plug-in.......Expand

Whether over FireWire or USB 2.0, this interface combines great routing flexibility, powerful internal DSP effects processing, and standalone cue mixing for use without a laptop. Also in this review: MOTU's Volta voltage-control interface plug-in.

One of the more difficult decisions that the recording enthusiast has to make is choosing between mobility vs. flexibility. While having a large rack of interfaces, effects and dynamic processors can be useful in a set-location studio, it is pretty difficult to throw this setup into the trunk of the car to record a local singer or to enhance your own performance.

MOTU has been meeting this challenge with its UltraLite and Traveler series of audio interfaces, which not only feature impressive input and output configurations, but also include a formidable array of DSP-based processes that add great value to these small packages. In this review of the MOTU UltraLite-mk3 Hybrid, we will look at exactly how much flexibility can be packaged into a simple half-rack of gear...

This stereo compressor builds on the FET II's sterling reputation, but offers some tricks of its own at a surprising price.

While his products are heavily inspired by classic circuit designs and sounds of the past (T......Expand

This stereo compressor builds on the FET II's sterling reputation, but offers some tricks of its own at a surprising price.

While his products are heavily inspired by classic circuit designs and sounds of the past (Trident A Series, anyone?), Geoff Daking is a no-nonsense guy who does not buy into the myths, the hype, or the puritanical nature of the vintage audio world, and as such is not afraid to use modern and more reliable components "to create products that give you the performance of the classics without the headaches."

This philosophy is more than evident in his newest creation, the Daking FET III stereo compressor, which combines his classic sound and design with the modern efficient components at a very affordable price point...

We last reviewed Sound Forge Pro as Version 9 in our January 2008 issue. Version 10 of this stellar audio editing program has some exciting new features, as well as some new plug-ins, so let's dive in...

It's here, and it doesn't need Avid hardware any more. What else makes this new version of the industry's most widely adopted DAW stand out?

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard that Avid, the artist......Expand

It's here, and it doesn't need Avid hardware any more. What else makes this new version of the industry's most widely adopted DAW stand out?

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard that Avid, the artist formerly known as Digidesign, released Pro Tools 9. Needless to say, it's been crazy: mass hysteria everywhere, dogs and cats living together, the Mayan calendar being condemned for being off by a year, etc. and so on. So, all that drama aside, what's new in Pro Tools 9 that could cause all this? Let's take a look at some of the highlights...

With its built-in multitrack recording capability, this powerful and great-sounding sample playback keyboard may be the ultimate songwriter's instrument.

Roland has been in the keyboard business for many years; I am ......Expand

With its built-in multitrack recording capability, this powerful and great-sounding sample playback keyboard may be the ultimate songwriter's instrument.

Roland has been in the keyboard business for many years; I am one of those older players who remembers back when keyboards and the occasional drum machine were all Roland made. Then came keyboard amps, and a lot of other gear, and somewhat more recently, Roland got into the business of digital audio recording, and when that happened, it happened with a bang: one of my first major projects as an Editor for Recording was reviewing the VS-880, Roland's groundbreaking hard disk recorder, in 1996.

Now it's 2011, and the technologies of digital keyboard synthesis and of digital audio recording have advanced significantly. Where not too long ago you would expect a synth and a recorder to be in two large, separate, expensive boxes, it becomes practical to have the same computer brain handle both tasks at once. Roland's new Juno-Gi is called a Mobile Synthesizer With Digital Recorder because that's what it is -- a synth, and a recorder, all in a package that's so light and power-efficient that it can run on batteries....

The founder of Tommy Boy Records examines what it takes to make a hit in today's world of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Eager songwriters take note!

Tom Silverman founded the independent label Tommy Boy thirty years ago. Over time it was home to a great many award-winning artists and consistently dominated the Dance charts.

Together with industry veteran Dave Lory, Tom Silverman launched the New Music Seminar (www.newmusicseminar.com) where today's songwriters, artists, and recording musicians can tune into the latest industry trends as presented by high-profile producers, performers, and other industry figures who are at the forefront of the new developments.

We will report on the latest seminar taking place in February in Los Angeles. In the meantime, we wanted to hear Tom's views on the state of the industry as it affects songwriters and new artists....

How does production tie into songwriting, and how does it help determine which songs succeed while others fail? This chart-topping producer offers some sage advice.

Songwriters don't all operate the same way. Some write their songs and make minimal demos to arouse interest in artists or producers who, it is hoped, will more fully produce and record the songs, maybe even -- fingers crossed -- turn them into hits.

Another type of songwriter is also a producer who writes or co-writes songs that are tailored to a specific artist, and who then records and produces that artist's interpretation of those songs, all the way through to the finished mastering-ready single or album.

L.A.-based Berklee-graduate Sebastian Arocha Morton is such a songwriter/producer when he's not doing other things in his studio, like producing music for film or TV or doing hit remixes... see our introduction to his body of work with artists from Sting to Seal in our May 2009 issue.

For this issue of Recording that focuses on songwriters and their challenges, we asked Sebastian about his work with Samantha James -- two albums to date that have racked up impressive sales numbers and produced hits that are high on Billboard and other charts....